


Remembrance of Formats Past

by BettlerWerdenFuerstenbrueder



Series: ZMcZ Prompt Ultramarathon [6]
Category: El Goonish Shive
Genre: Gen, Pastiche
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2019-01-11
Updated: 2019-01-11
Packaged: 2019-09-16 07:38:26
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,268
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16949781
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/BettlerWerdenFuerstenbrueder/pseuds/BettlerWerdenFuerstenbrueder
Summary: I don't know what made me think this was a good idea.





	Remembrance of Formats Past

**Author's Note:**

> ...well... okay, I sort of do. My original plan was to do some Tensaided/Cheerleadra crack, but there was nothing I could do with Ashley in one day that didn't leave a bad taste in my mouth. (And yes, notwithstanding the extended flashbacks in this chapter, and possibly - haven't decided yet - a jump midway through the final chapter, despite being based on a novel whose "present" runs some thirty years, this story's "present" will indeed be a single day.) The anachronism of Tensaided's store was always going to be a theme (my first working title was "...and Chill"), so the current title popped into my head one day, and I decided to run with it.
> 
> ...really, really, really run with it.

For a long time, he'd gone to bed female.  Sometimes, when he would lie back, his breasts would grow so quickly he'd had no time to even say "I'd better transform."  As he drifted off in this form, he'd yearn for Ashley, or open his/her eyes to settle the shifting kaleidoscope of their slightly redder visual range in the darkness.  Or, perhaps, while asleep, he/she returned to an earlier stage in life, now forever outgrown: an old childish terror, Norah Vincent's "masquerade ball" he'd played into for so long.

As Eve was created from the rib of Adam, a woman came into existence while Elliot slept, formed by Magic's gratification of its incomprehensible appetite.  Humanity, so very remote, struck its notions with something beyond the simian shapes it made of minute portions of itself, as his self-image bent beyond the weight of "hers."  In any case, something happened far more momentous than a florid euphemism for a wank.

And now she was well awake.  Her body had turned for the last time and the digital angel of certainty had made all the objects in her bedroom stand still, her laptop, her alarm clock, her sister who slammed her pillow over her ears.

It made her think back to elementary school, when she'd been a boy unquestionably, when she'd seen a purple-haired girl being tormented by a far larger boy she'd, or he then, had called friend.  Without a second thought he'd attacked him, from the same sense of chivalry that was part of the masquerade he today fancied he'd outgrown.  Of course, the boy he'd saved was now a girl as often as not, although あの人の savior wouldn't learn this for some seven years, almost until such time as Elliot himself would be in form female as often as not, albeit with a much more masculine character to the superposition.

The magic lantern of centuries past had by the time of Elliot's birth long since been replaced by a greater sort of magic - not the sort he would come to so embrace in adulthood, but better grasp of the mundane making more effective chips of semiconductor junction, yielding a rapid simulation of the simulated mathematician Turing had imagined to prove the finitude (er, countability) of any sophont's probative abilities.  A quantum-scale artificial army of the mathematicians Turing and Church had envisioned to fail in Hilbert's pathological task that could yet accomplish any of natural human imagination within its wildest extremes (within Microsoft's parameters) had been purchased by his parents just to distract him on evenings when he seemed terrible beyond the jurisdiction of brownies.

The magic of the human race, Elliot knew, was an application of a field permeating the fabric of the universe, just like the electric and magnetic, which on planets with the sort of chain reaction that was the sapient life of Earth and the Uryuom world, tended to produce sentient beings eternally beyond them, who exerted an overwhelming force on all their lives.  Perhaps the Uryuom prohibition on object-oriented programming - such an odd thing to ban - had some basis in necessity?  Maybe the strides gained from something silly as OOP were from something inherent in whatever being controlled their world, and what we perceived as necessary limitations would someday be understood to be limitations governed by our own such being.

Nonetheless, for all the technological development that had proceeded since, Elliot (and Ellen, in both versions of her memory) had felt obliged to leave both his family and the trapping of this era, to send himself up to his room with a book.  The only thing that might bring him back down was a tape - as everyone called it in those days, DVD having just begun to replace VHS - from the rental store of Tensaided.  As an adult, she had begun to work for him, anachronistic as his business had become, and so in male form he reported that morning.

While trying to look busy for Tensaided's benefit, Elliot's eye caught a glimpse of a bit of animation he had vague fond memories of - something about a girls' boarding school in Paris.  The layers arranged by and for helical scan, now reflected before him in imperceptible grooves whose reflection of a laser would once cause arrangements of ink to flicker on his old CRT screen, did the same in his mind, and from this came a vision of a town long dead.

****

Moperville, to those outside the twenty-mile radius beyond which its newspaper commanded twice the price, was nothing more than a place that symbolized a call to unholy faith.  To live in, it was a bit depressing in an existential way, a monster in the halls of the school meriting no more than a cradled face, a little green man in the annual pride parade no more than a golf clap, even as one would be aware that these things weren't seen, but that one should not speak of them, beyond that twenty-mile radius, or even really within.  No one had ever told them this, and it did not need to be enforced, but the communal apathy somehow engineered, combined with the reflexive dismissiveness of the outside world, instilled something unspoken.  Of course, all this was when film runs to CVS were still routine, when cell phones had barely ceased to be called "car phones," well before they were simply "phones."

Shortly after the incident with the boy Elliot had once called his best friend and the child that friend had tormented - Tedd Verres the latter's name - Elliot's parents and the latter's father (the mother not long ago having not only divorced him, but emigrated) had met.  The way the father had flinched at his son having been mistaken for a girl Elliot was convinced at eighteen he had seen, but in the haze of memory, especially that of a child, who can say?  In any case, that child, that boy, as he'd thought of him then, an identity both of them had then, and for years after, defended so vociferously, had become one of Elliot's closest friends, even forming an uneasy truce with Tony, who'd so tormented him, until the latter's final parting from Elliot a few years later, as they would all begin to internalize the link between sex and sexuality, giving rise to an incident involving a boy unquestionably, one who would become nearly as dear to Elliot in the coming years as the purple-haired androgyne.

Of course, by his friendship with Tedd, Elliot would often meet his father, whose tongue was tied by his professional duties, whatever the hell they were.  "Ah!" he would say, when Elliot's parents would engage him, "I've said too much already; what a pretentious person might call my cocktail banter is penned off by Uncle Sam.  I do have to say it's nice to have an escape from that world, though.  Elliot, son, you have a leader's character; never let it starve for lack of what it needs."

In those days Elliot had been a bibliophile.  He'd seen in himself then a sort of Apollonian masculinity, a Hegelian synthesis to Andrew Sullivan's ironic "sin" and its far older antithesis, that physical strength was inherent to absorbing DWEM wisdom - today amidst that of others, of course.  By the combination of the masculine ideals imparted to him by both those books and the Internet, along with his mother's manifest lost potential, a notion of übermensch he would not admit to holding had secretly filled his brain to be tested in him, a philosopher monarch, a warrior poet.

Nonetheless, in every book Elliot read, however he built his own body, he felt he was denied a vital frontier in the conquest of truth.  His initial thought was that however he transported himself into the place and time his reading described, he would never experience them.  Yet even this thought inspired a pang of guilt, inasmuch as he was well-read enough to understand that this urge had inspired white men such as that he would shortly become to slaughter and enslave - hell, the land he walked on was the product of white men either bargaining asymmetrically or simply raping and pillaging their way across.  Of course, even those butchers had lived by the skin of their teeth, barely better off than those they'd slaughtered.  Elliot, meanwhile, got to enjoy the fruits of their genocide, just as they'd intended, and should be thankful, and perhaps, more apologetic than the killers themselves, who at least had had it in them to do the killing.  Rather, he spent eighteen years surrounded by all the conveniences whose distant ancestors even Poe, who'd shat in a pot and predeceased the Grimms, had had Scheherazade executed for dreaming up.

Edward Verres and his son, whom Elliot had befriended after saving from Tony, would not infrequently come for dinner.  The Dunkels all knew that he had ties to that great ship of State, and so he was a good dinner-guest, in case their comfort attracted an afflicted element.  It was this as much as anything that made Tedd take precedence over Tony, at least until the incident with Justin, but by then the die was long cast.

From where Elliot and his family lived there were two real commercial districts.  The smaller, that which he'd pass on the way to Moperville North, was that which held Tensaided's video store, as well as an ice cream shop and a number of less reputable businesses, among them a dojo Elliot would one day join, teaching an "art" cut from whole cloth by the American anime nerd who owned it.  Diametrically opposed in his childhood eyes was the way to the downtown, along an artery one Pompoms had bought the name of.  It would be some time yet before he'd remember meeting the younger Ms. Pompoms, although, reflecting from the video store where she also now worked, there flashed through his brain a number of times he, through one Sarah Brown, had met a girl who must have been her.

Sarah was a girl whom Elliot had known as long as Tony, but by the time he'd met Tedd they were slightly estranged, Elliot having chosen him over her almost by accident, a consequence of the sex segregation of young children. Sarah, however, he sensed in his preadolescence, had been hurt by this, and despite his perennial effort to suture the wound, as long as Tony remained in his life, the scar remained tender.  Tony had nearly broken Tedd's jaw for practically no reason, and yet they got along better than Tony got along with Sarah.  There was something in Tony's demeanor that alienated Sarah, and likewise, something in Sarah's demeanor that alienated Tony.  At that age, Elliot thought he had found, like Tom Sawyer's "fundamental principle of human nature," what it was in Sarah's demeanor that had alienated Tony: it was a sort of bistable androgyny of personality (albeit a superficial androgyny, rather than the fundamental kind Elliot would one day know in Tedd, and to a lesser extent, himself), masculine and feminine traits both manifest in exaggerated form.  If it was "for girls," she would either loathe it or love it, the former perhaps because she was expected to love it, the latter of course because she actually did - or maybe the other way around, the latter because she wanted to.  This was combined with a certain - Elliot might have then said "masculine" - aggression at the raising of either notion.

As for Tony, the Rubicon in their friendship would be crossed around fourteen, maybe fifteen, he wasn't sure, shortly after Elliot had begun to fight in that ludicrous dojo near Tensaided's store, which he'd chosen for the ostensible lack of discipline such an artificial art must come with.  There he met the girl who'd become his first girlfriend, one Nanase Kitsune, and they played with one another's bodies every time they saw one another, whoever was watching.  Nanase would even put a hand down his pants, but only to caress his thighs; she would not touch what lay between them.  Elliot, following her lead, played with her every external inch, but would not think to touch that sacred triangle, just as she avoided his.  Regardless, it was not their childish playing at intimate pleasure that most affected the later life of either, but the only student who today might for a moment challenge either of them, one Justin Tolkiberry.

He didn't first meet Justin at the dojo; rather, he met him through Tony, in a way.  While going to meet Tony, he found him with three other boys who were attacking a fifth, beating him until he was on the ground.  To Tony's credit, he didn't join in, just shouting, "that'll show you, faggot, queer," and so on, but still, perhaps spurred on by past memories, it was Tony Elliot attacked.  At that, the other boys stopped, only staring - Elliot would later realize, through the rumor mill, that that was the first time he had called on his "demons," whatever it was inside him that Greg's dojo had awakened.  Even then, such things were known to happen in Moperville.  From then on they'd been fast friends, Justin joining the dojo.

Elliot remembered once, about a year and a half before the day he'd found that DVD, he'd gone down to Tedd's basement.  Tedd and Sarah had working together on a project, Elliot knew, but he had assumed Sarah wouldn't be there, since she'd called in sick for the past few days.  Instead, not only was Sarah there, she was a catgirl, and Tedd was frantically working to reverse it.  He reassured her it would only last a month, but she wasn't willing to wait that long.  Funny, these days, the most anyone would do would be to jeer if a student - even a male student - showed up one day a catgirl.

It hit Elliot that day in Tensaided's store - it had hit him at the time, briefly, but he had dismissed it as a trick of the light, a consequence of Tedd's soft face.  Though not too pronounced, Tedd had had breasts, and broad hips.  Tedd, that day, months before the first time Elliot had thought he'd first seen him that way, was a girl.  He thought back over the preceding years, and like the vague memories of Sarah's posh friend, a number of interactions with Tedd struck him, here an odd smell beneath his threshold of consciousness, there a then-supposed illusory glimpse of something he hadn't been supposed to see.

****

For Mariko to admit you to her "小さな党," there were infinite conditions, all indispensable, but one rose above the others.  You must give tacit adherence to a Creed that Tensaided was Turing and Dijkstra in one, that Lucy was the space age Stanton, that Greg in his writings against religion (despite Mariko's own piety) was sent by the gods themselves.  Her "faithful" thus thinned by the week.  Even her own sister and her husband had been chased away.  Dishonored as they were, Mariko would not even use their names; they were "the witch" and "the fed."

Lucy had invited some truly risible fellow.  "What is this dressing?" her idiot whispered to Tensaided, sitting on the opposite side.

"Miso ginger," Mariko snapped.

Tensaided, meanwhile, would captivate them with his knowledge of those strange "high-speed digital computers," as Woody Allen might say, that were so changing the world.  To them, they were - what even were they?  But to Tensaided, they were exactly what their name suggested - computers.  They were attached to keyboards, and to monitors, and phones, but ultimately they had a single function, to compute.  It was a matter of what could be sent on that phone line, what should be shown on that monitor, what could be drawn from that keyboard, so far beyond what some ape with a slide rule or convenience store calculator could come up with.

As for what might show up on that monitor, of course the usual transmission of information and processing and storage of data were central, but increasingly, it became clear that pixel-by-pixel animations were the order of the day, even for quotidian tasks.  It had once shocked Tensaided to realize that these dynamic animations, even those intricate games, were nothing more than one frame rendered at a time in a while loop.  It seemed too easy, that for all the work getting the data into place, in the end, it was just that simple - tell every pixel on the screen what to be, again, and again, and again.

Similarly, Tensaided had been captivated since childhood by the notion that a film could be a computer program.  He was old enough that to him a "personal computer" had once been a box on which lines of text scrolled by, occasionally switching to VGA graphics.  The realistic graphics that had even by the years preceding Elliot's birth become so routine had once to him been an absurd fantasy.

To wit, he'd been working on video compression.  The dream he would one day rue the realization of, he then hoped to help to bring about, a man whose very name, he'd been told, was an intentional absurdity.  Though this heritage had been forgotten before his patrilineal ancestor's ninteenth-century arrival to the States, he was most likely the descendant of a court Jew, for his proficiency in mathematics named for a geometric absurdity, a thing of beauty halved into an abomination unto reason itself, and so language made a jester of a vizier.  Four, six, eight, twelve, and twenty - all of these followed naturally from the attempt to fit to the plane that which did not belong on the plane.  Ten, the number so precious to man, had no place in God's creation.

In the modern era, even as Tensaided worked, Euclid's rigor, of course, was obsolete, replaced by a wholly new notion of rigor, borne of the early modern dark ages of such rigor no longer being taken for granted, through the barber who did and did not shave himself, to such contradiction becoming intrinsic to not only theory but practice.  The same incompleteness theorem that imbeciles liked to use against the notion of truth had given rise to the very concept of a computer, by Turing's alternate proof, even before it was mechanically feasible for any practical application beyond an orrery.

And so Tensaided used endless transformations of the Moperian log of various encodings of natural inputs over time, hoping he could find some sort of concise representation.  He did, perhaps, but nothing to beat the condensed formats already on the market.  He stole freely, reverse engineering everything, telling himself the lesson of his very name, that mathematics was something beyond any god, beyond physical reality itself, that it could not be patented.  Soon, though, he found a particular filetype he could not crack.

For this, he spent days and nights, first showing up bleary-eyed and often hungover to Mariko's home, then soon forsaking her 小さな党 altogether.  It was madness, sheer madness.  He wasted so long with a coda that was not even its filetype!

****

There were whispers throughout Moperville - Elliot had heard them since he was a child - that Tensaided's store, anachronism that it was even then, was a front for some criminal enterprise.  Through Susan, Elliot had come to know better.  It was a passion project, a waste of the savings he'd accrued, and continued to accrue slightly, through his patents on auxiliary technologies to the very thing that had brought about his current enterprise's demise.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> ...okay. This was a terrible idea, and I'm not going to keep going right away, even though putting up this chapter alone leaves the prompt bleeding in a ditch. I'll probably finish it eventually, but before I do even the second chapter, I'm going to do not just the next prompt, but two RWBY fics, a chapter each in my Frozen and Star fics, and maybe a chapter of Prototype. (Also, it took me so damn long to find the canonical Japanese translation of "petit clan," and only after I found it did I realize "petit clan" might've served the same purpose.)


End file.
